"I wonder what Mark Fisher would have thought about the spread across all the end-of-year lists of what is effectively (regardless of genre or sonic specifics) a new singer-songwriter ethos...  recordings approached and analysed and felt largely as literary expressions... narratives of self, social comment, political stances and statements, representations of identity, thematic links  ....  the criticism surrounding it somewhat more attentive to sound and rhythm than Paul Nelson's purely literary appreciation of  Jackson Browne in Stranded, but fundamentally coming from the same place, the same understanding of how popular music works and what it's for.  Today, listening to and reading about this kind of album (fucking Norman Fucking Rockwell the supreme example), it feels like what's going on between artist and critics is a performance of  Importance and Seriousness - Masterpiece Theater you could call it - one that harks back achingly to a time when such major statements could be presumed to be of universal significance. In that sense, true retro rather than surface retro (although NFR is laden with the surface kind too, while Weyes Blood is a singer-songwriter era reenactment).

"The thought of Mark's scorn is a painful pleasure, since we'll never know how he would have worded it or what insights he'd have filleted from the middlebrow morass. He probably would have felt similarly about much of the quality TV of our time - the "must-see" stuff where the "must" connotes not so much "compulsive" as "compulsory"  - claiming our attention via an appeal to a vague dutifulness, the necessity to keep abreast of Important Statements.

"I suspect Mark would have felt this kind of thing to be the diametric opposite of "pulp modernism", i.e. mass entertainment of a seemingly escapist and purely spectacular type (escapist even when dystopian), within which are secreted  concepts and philosophical-political thought-bombs - arguably all the more potent for being inveigled into minds that are not already primed to be edified or "challenged".

"He would instinctively have been supportive of the kind of movies and TV that only get nominated for awards in technical categories like special effects, editing, lighting, etc.

"He'd probably have liked Chernobyl though - for the science-fiction-NOW landscapes of catastrophe...."

SR, January 2020

 Because I very rarely rehearse, at first I am at odds with the guitar. It doesn't feel natural, but this means my mind is open to new ideas. I haven't formed ruts down the fingerboard by playing the same things. It's still very much unexplored territory.  Maybe that's why I don't feel attached to my instruments. It's almost like I'm going to dominate them in some way. I don't feel like they're part of me; they stand between me and something new

- The Edge

 “Here it was an aesthetic revolution that made the changes. For 5 years the class system didn’t seem to exist--nobody ever used the word…. I remember about 1970, for the first time in something like five or six years, I heard someone who was being interviewed on the radio use the word ‘working class’. Which would have been unthinkable in say, 1967 or 1968. Unthinkable. I thought, ‘my God, that’s the death knell of change. It’s coming to an end.’ And it did, and now we’re back in the same closed, confined, class-conscious little society… I don’t think the radical change needed to transform this country can come from the political direction at all. I think it can only come from the area of the arts--some sort of seismic shift in aesthetic sensibility, of a kind that we saw in the mid-60s, when this country was improved for the better. There was no question about it--liberated, briefly….” 

J.G. Ballard, 1983

 "Ambient techno doesn't need a brightly burning

SOUL like Billy Ray Martin's; 'soul'--and this applies to all

forms of MODERN music, not just techno--is dispersed

polymorphously throughout the soundscape, taking up residence

in the bassline, the panoply of textures, even the drum

track.  Instead of 'soul'--that one bombastic figure pouring

out a heartful of passion--there's a diffuse

spirituality/sensuality that spreads across the entire

surface, or skin, of a piece of music.  Time to talk of music

in terms of its erogenous, or eroto-mystical zones, rather

than its 'soul'."

- SR

 "Music makes you happy and it doesn't harm you. Most things that make you feel better are harmful. Music is like a drug - that doesn't kill you"

- Fran Leibowitz, on why people love music and love musicians. 

 "The whole ethic of the band, though it was unwritten and rarely spoken, was to create new music, so if a piece had a similarity/reminded someone of another work it was generally rejected. The emphasis was on new... It was all about new sounds and new ways of writing a song.... Even now, making a new sound is still our first impulse, and that includes not repeating previous Pram recordings...To repeat ourselves or someone else would be boring and not really worth the effort.... My working life is ten times harder than it needs to be because I hate repeating what’s gone before“ 

- Matt Eaton,  Pram, 2011

 "Pablo Casals said that 'the desire for innovation leads to greater aberrations in art than would acceptance of what's already there' and I think he's definitely got a point"

 - Tom Verlaine, 1981